Trump’s Gaza ‘peace plan’
Predators to share spoils
By Jeremy Salt
Expert on Mideast history
The only positive immediate outcome of the Trump “peace plan” is the resumption of aid to the Gazans. They need to stock up as much as they can and as fast as they can because it won’t be long until Netanyahu finds a pretext to resume the killing.
This “plan” is not a plan for peace at all. It is yet another betrayal of the Palestinian people at the benefit of the genocidal entity that has been butchering them for the past two years and for the previous 70 years. The lesson learned by Israel, again, is that crime does pay, even the biggest crime in international law: genocide.
The 1990s “peace process” was sold as the “peace of the brave,” when it was nothing but the “peace of the grave,” with all Palestinian rights supposedly interred forever.
The current reincarnation from the 1990s is far worse. Except for a cameo role for Mahmoud Abbas and the “Palestinian technicians” who will have to work under the direction of the Manhattan Pharaoh, the Palestinians will play no part in deciding their future.
It will be decided for them. If that sounds familiar, it should because that is what they have been fighting against for 100 years.
This imperial diktat is full of traps and loopholes inserted for the benefit of Israel and inserted by Israel. There can be no “peace” without the West Bank and Jerusalem, but as the plan points out, this is only peace for Gaza, which means, even worse than the 1990s, that in the eyes of the “peacemakers,” occupied Al-Quds (Jerusalem) — and the west is just as much occupied as the east — and the West Bank are Israel’s now.
So, again, no real peace at all. If the thought of including the West Bank and Jerusalem was ever in anyone’s mind, Netanyahu would have blocked it. Furthermore, the rights of the 1948 generation would have to be taken into account in any genuine peace. They are just as important as the rights of subsequent generations, irrespective of the attempts, even of previous “peacemakers” (Carter, Clinton, and all the others), to ignore them.
Now, in the Trump “peace” plan, even the rights of the Palestinians occupied since 1967 have no place.
According to this flimsy plan, the “war” will end immediately. Israel will withdraw to an “agreed line,” clearly within Gaza, so only a partial withdrawal. Again, this is like the Israeli “withdrawal” from the West Bank in the 1990s, which meant not withdrawal at all but redeployment.
How deep the “agreed line” will stretch into Gaza is not mentioned, nor is how or by whom it will be agreed. Not that this is not clear, without needing to be written down. It will be decided by Israel, whatever the spin coming out of the White House.
There is no call for a permanent end to military operations by Israel. They will only be “suspended,” leaving them open to being resumed by Israel on the pretext of violations by Hamas whenever Netanyahu decides. With the Gaza captives safely home, he does not even have their imprisonment as a restraint.
Who will decide the volume of aid or the time frame in which it will be delivered is not mentioned. The plan lays down delivery through the UN, the Red Cross, and “institutions not associated with either,” which clearly will include the totally discredited Israeli-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), where food has been the lure for Israeli soldiers and US contractors to murder more than 1,000 Palestinians since May.
There will be a transitional government of “apolitical Palestinians”. This is possibly the most ludicrous suggestion of all. They might as well have said zombies as there is no such thing as an “apolitical Palestinian,” not even amongst the children. Clearly, they will be imported from another planet and called Palestinians.
Trump, and possibly Blair, will handle funding for redevelopment until the Palestinian Authority completes its “reform program”. What reform program, one might ask? In fact, the PA does not represent the Palestinians at all.
No one will be forced to leave Gaza. That is good. Their homes, shops, schools, universities, and mosques have all been destroyed. They have nowhere to live. They have been massacred and starved to death, but the governments that have watched all this without intervening to stop it now say they are not being forced to leave. The wheedling hypocrisy in all of this is just disgusting.
Hamas “and other factions” will have no role in the new administration. As the “other factions” would include PIJ, the PFLP, and all other armed groups. What these predators are actually after, in the guise of peace, is the complete destruction of Palestinian armed resistance.
Israel will progressively withdraw from Gaza, “save for a security perimeter that will remain until Gaza is properly secured”. There is no mention of who will decide when this point has been reached. Neither is there any mention of how deep this “security perimeter” will extend into Gaza. In other words, again, Israel is not going to withdraw from Gaza at all, even in the medium term. In fact, Netanyahu and the cohort around him do not intend ever to withdraw, but to colonize and settle.
Nothing is said about who is going to pay for all this, but presumably the international investors and rabid West Bank settlers who cannot wait to get their hands on Gazan real estate practically going for free, in a replay of what Chaim Weizmann said in 1948 on contemplating the enormous mass of land from which the Palestinian owners had been driven out: “What a miraculous simplification of our task.”
It will be simplified even more once the first natural gas platform is built offshore and the money begins pouring into the pockets of Israeli and international corporations and investors.
Trump says all of this will be good for the Palestinians, too, but does anyone seriously think these plunderers are going to build their shopping centers and residential towers for the people they have been complicit in slaughtering for the past two years? Does anyone seriously think they could give a damn about the Palestinians? No, they are going to be brushed aside like the bothersome insects that racist Israeli generals, politicians, and rabbis have often likened them to.
The team gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh on October 15 included all the governments complicit in the genocide. No mention was made of the Kushner-Trump Barbie dolls, who quickly flew to Tel Aviv, via occupied Lydd, to make sure they were not left out of the big money action.
The predators were in Sinai, not to create peace but to bury the Palestine “problem” forever, before celebrating over cocktails in whatever five-star hotel they are staying at.
This is what Trump calls “peace for the first time in 3000 years”. On the Middle East, its history, its culture, and its people, ignorance spills out of his mouth every time he opens it. He has no idea what he is talking about.
The Gaza diktat is what Trump calls the pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood when, in fact, it pushes it entirely in the opposite direction. The intention is not to create a Palestinian State, but to bury it beneath the administrative enclave they are going to run in Gaza under their supervision and call a state. The whip hand will be Israel’s as it has no intention of letting go of Gaza.
Trump is the colonial governor dictating terms to subjected African tribes in the late 19th century. If they had not learnt the lesson yet from the bullets spitting out of the end of the Gatling and Maxim guns, well, they were going to suffer in a way they had never suffered before.
Similarly, “hell” is what awaited the Palestinians, unless they agreed to his “peace plan,” Trump said, apparently not noticing the living hell Israel had already put them in. The choice which has been given to them in this “peace plan” is “drink from the poisoned chalice, or we’re going to kill you.” Not much of a choice, is it?
The article first appeared on
Palestine Chronicle.